On Silence and Judgement

 

:1:

I don't propose to enter into a detailed response, in this blogpost, to DeLillo's latest. Or to be more precise, I'm interested in my broader reaction to DeLillo's latest rather than the more detailed specifics of such reaction. 

The Silence is brief. It's padded-out in my edition with large font (in, irksomely enough, typewriter case throughout, like a typescript from 1960) to 116 pages, but the whole is well under 20,000 words. It opens inside a plane on its way from Paris to New York. One passenger, Jim, is coping with his anxiety by reading the numbers off the in-flight screen: ‘arrival time sixteen thirty-two. Speed four seventy-one m.p.h. Time to destination three thirty-four’ and so on. His wife Tessa, a poet, is jotting things in her notebook. DeLillo describes her with an awkwardly egregious emphasis on pigmenation: ‘dark-skinned, Tessa Berens’; ‘Caribbean-European-Asian origins’ and the like. Then, later in the novel, when Jim and Tessa have made their way to Diane Lucas' Manhattan appartment, we get: ‘Diana thought she was beautiful, mixed-parentage’ [71]. Diane is a retired university professor and is hosting a Super Bowl party with her husband Max and a younger friend Martin (this latter one Diane's former students; he seems to be on the autism spectrum). The skin-colour of these other characters is not vouchsafed to us, but we can intuit the blanke default, alas (at one point, inside the appartment, DeLillo peers into Tessa's mind and shares what, we assume, he assumes a woman like her would be thinking: ‘she sees herself. She is different from these people. She imagines taking off her clothes nonerotically to show them who she is’ [91]. And then again, later: ‘Tessa Berens studies the backs of her hands as if confirming the color, her color’ [112]. Hmm.)

Anyway: Jim and Tessa's plane suffers engine failure and lands bumpily, leaving Jim with a wound where his head knocked against the window. In Manhattan, Diane, Max and Martin talk sport, types of bourbon, telescopes, life, the universe and Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity which Martin quotes at length from memory, in English and German, sometimes affecting an Albert Einstein voice. 

The big event of the novel happens: electricity dies, the grid has failed, all the screens go black. It's a temporary inconvenience, or it's a permanent collapse, the novel doesn't tell us. Jim and Tessa make their way to a NY hospital where Jim's head is bandaged. The two of them have sex in a toilet cubicle before walking across town to Diane's appartment. There they join the others in disposing of the time with chatty chatting chat. Max performs an imaginary commentary of what might be happening at the Super Bowl. More Einstein is quoted. Ponderings on the nature of reality alternate with banalities. The book ends by giving each of the main characters a two-page-long monologue: Diane talks about ‘staring into space’ and ‘time's arrow’; Jim recounts their emergency landing (‘I was tossed sideways into the window, someone was shouting fire, was a wing on fire’); Max recalls walking around the now darkened city; Tessa speculates on apocalypse (‘is our normal experience being stilled? Are we witnessing a deviation in nature itself?’) and finally Martin quotes some more Einsein. Bish bash and, dare I say it, bosh: the novel is done.

This is a slight piece of work, or it isn't; a five-finger exercise or a brilliant distillation. There are, I think, interesting, or potentially interesting, things going on. It's a novel about end zones, end times (like lots of DeLillo) and about words. It's about words in the sense that there's very little descriptive prose; it's almost entirely dialogue—it reads, indeed, as if DeLillo had originally conceived it as a play, and only latterly decided to novelise his material—and therefore about that John Ashbery thang of threading profundity and beauty through the quotidian murmurs and gabble of ordinary speech. But it's also about words in a more quasi-religious, lapsed-Catholic logos sense: ‘“Cryptocurrencies ... Crypto” [Diane] says, pausing, keeping her eyes on Martin. “Currencies.” Somewhere within all those syllables, something secret, covert, intimate’ [86]. Lest we miss this, DeLillo repeatedly presses the relevant pedal:

“The painted ceilings. Rome,” she said. “The tourists looking up.”

“Standing absoluely still.”

“Saints and angels. Jesus of Nazareth.”

“The luminous figure. The Nazarene. Einstein,” he said. [53]

There's also lots in the novel to do with screens. Airborne Jim reading his screen for comfort. Everyone on their phones all the time, as everyone is nowadays. Folk gathered to watch not the Super Bowl (as DeLillo's characters gather to watch the baseball at the beginning of Underworld) but to watch a screen-mediated version of the Super Bowl. Screens, DeLillo knows, grant us only a kind of simulacrum of access to things and people, but screens also screen us from things and people, protect us. That, combined with the gestured-towards (lazily gestured-towards would be an overly judgmental way of putting it, but still) consilience of Einstein's weird physics and religious faith, is the main thrust of this book.

Alright. But, as I said at the beginning, I'm not here to delve into all that. Rather I'm intrigued by the fact that, upon finishing the novel I could not decide whether it was any good or not. This is what I tweeted at that time:

Consider: I am a professional critic. Determining and assessing literary and aesthetic judgment is literally what I do for a living. You'd think I'd be able to thumbs-up or thumbs-down a 20,000 word novella. And yet here we are.

I don't mean to protest too much, of course. I could certainly gussy-up a reaction, if pressed (or, as it might be, paid: for instance paid to write a review of the title). That's not my point. Rather I'm intrigued by the Schrödinger's felinity of this particular novel. Aren't our aesthetic responses more intuitive and immediate than this? If I drink a slug of milk I know immediately whether it's gone off or not. If I hear a song for the first time I can, by and large, tell whether I like it, or at the very least whether I'm going to like it, as (if) I become more famliar with it. DeLillo, increasingly (which is to say with a lot of his later, post 9/11 fiction), leaves me baffled on this front. I don't mean baffled with respect to what the novel's about, what he's doing and so on. Baffled on this fundamental level of not knowing whether his novel is good or is shit. Honestly, The Silence could be either.

My milk analogy isn't entirely apropos, I know. Kant's Critique of Judgement distinguishes between four modes of aesthetic response: agreeable / disagreeable; good / bad; beautiful / ugly; sublime / contemptible. The agreeable is a simple sensory judgment (it gives immediate sensory pleasure; ‘this doughnut tastes nice’, ‘this bed is soft’ and so on). The good is a moral judgment, and so connected to Kant's idea of a fixed and absolute notion of ethical reason. The beautiful is a ‘subjective universal’ judgment, one that relies on what Kant calls the ‘free play’ of the cognitive powers of imagination and understanding, and which he argues must broadly conform with the sorts of judgements (‘this is beautiful’, ‘this is ugly’) of other reasonable and cultured people, a sensus communis as to the criteria of taste by which such judgments can be made. The sublime is also a ‘subjective universal’, with the difference that it speaks not to proportion, harmony etc, but to a going-beyond the immediately comprehensible, an awe-inspiring affect of terror and wonder.

We're going beyond agreeability into quesions of taste, and taste, obviously, is taught rather than innate (judging a Haydn string quartet or a Rothko canvas is hardly an instinctual ability possessed by every newborn, after all). As a little kid I liked the bright, accessible music of Beatles but hated Bob Dylan's tuneless droning and wheezy soundworld. I later learned to love Dylan, and to see the aesthetic merit and resonance where before I heard only ugliness. Sometimes I engage with art and, as the phrase goes, bounce off it. Often I will give the art another go: for maybe the problem is me. Maybe I can learn to love it. And sometimes I do so! Often I don't. Of course I don't expect my aesthetic response to be always and everywhere instant and infallible. But ... I've been kicking around, aesthetic-judgment-wise, long enough (as per Malcolm Gladwell's Blink) for it often to be instant, and rarely wrong. In this case, though, my gut is caught, like a donkey between two equidistant and equally tempting bales of straw, who then starves to death, between good and bad as DeLillo judgments. Odd, no?

Perhaps the conclusion we should draw, here, is that DeLillo is unusually good at pitching his novels into an uncanny zone where good writing and bad writing are in weird superposition. I don't know though. I wonder, instead, whether there has been a shift in the sensus communis, in terms of the legitimacy of aesthetic judgment. Experimental art of the postwar period, especially through the 1960s and 1970s (more so I think than the earlier generation of High Modernism) foregrounded a range of artworks which invited the reaction ‘is this crap?’ (rather than, as it might be, ‘is this good according to a different set of aesthetic criteria to the ones with which I am familiar?’) Les Demoiselles d'Avignon set out to be shocking and deracinating of reaction, but in a different way to, let's say, Carl Andre's neatly rectangular arrangement of bricks, Equivalent VIII (‘120 firebricks arranged in a rectangular formation,’ say the Tate website: ‘an important Minimalist work [that] provoked uproar after a 15 February 1976 article appeared in The Sunday Times questioning both the work's artistic merit and the price paid by the Tate in acquiring the artwork’). I'm old enough to remember the furore over the Tate's ‘Bricks’, as the work became known. The thing that occurs to me is that most of this kerfuffle was socially performative. Some of it was reflex anti-intellectualism, a suspicion of ‘high culture’ tout court, ‘I don't know much about art but I know what I like’ and so on (‘Emperor's New Clothes!’ scornfulness and all that). Some of it was genuine confusion, perhaps from people who had assiduously acquired a quasi-Kantian canon of tastes in art, only now to feel they were being sneered at by artists telling them: that's all been superseded now. Some of it was partisan on the other side: ‘if it upsets the establishment and traditionalists then it is good’ etc. None of this, it seems to me, touches the fundamental reflex of response: is Equivalent VIII good art, because it embodies balance, harmony, poise etc but makes these things new within a challenging intellectual-conceptual framework? Or is it shit, because it's just a fucking stack of breeze blocks some shyster has managed to fob off on one of the world's great art galleries. Mutatis mutandis, is The Silence column A, here, or column B?

The point (it's an obvious point, I know) is that these are less textual than they are metatextual engagements; discussions less about the specifics of this one artwork and more about the parameters of art as such. Which, though perfectly valid and interesting as a debate, is not what this blogpost is about. I have no issue with the posmodern novel, or obliquity in novel-making, or evem DeLillo, many of whose novels—earlier novels, if I'm honest, but still—I hold in high regard. This blogpost, though, is about this one novel, and its shitness or otherwise. Alright?   

:2:

Samuel Johnson once said ‘No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.’ This may be the most wrongheaded thing Johnson ever said. I used to think it was, perhaps, only half-wrongheaded: that a man might, as it were, find hypocritical pleasure in Wagner in public, for the benefit of those he hoped to impress, and thereby for his own benefit, though he would still go home to his solitary domicile and his Easy Listening CDs. In other words I used to think that taste is, in large part defined by the movement from ego to Other and that it therefore necessarily encompasses both. But things are, I think, more complex than that. After all, we all of us often construe ‘pleasure’ when what we're actually experiencing is that-which-we-feel-we-ought-to-enjoy, or the pleasure of others we wish in turn to please, or perhaps to become like. We are social beings and therefore, as Freud notes in his Civilisation and Its Discontents, inexorably hypocritical. Our pleasures lie along precisely the same lines of force, even when, or perhaps especially when, we tell ourselves that they are our private business. Guilty pleasure is the horizon of pleasure of such, perhaps.

In part this reflects the fact that we can only gauge what our pleasures are by apprehending other peoples’ pleasures. The pleasure of others, for the various ways we construe that term ‘pleasure’, determines and shapes our pleasure. We sexually desire those who shape our sexual desire. We admire the art that is admirable by the standards of others (‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what others like …’). There aren’t any other standards for us to apply, after all. In the sense that we all own enjoyments that are not actually ours, we are nothing but hypocrites in our pleasures.

Johnson also said ‘he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man’ Thus the drunk, the crack-addict, the lecher and the sadist are all hoping for solace in their beastly life-projects. But these passtimes are quite alien to beasts (a lecherous beast? A drunk beast? A sadistic beast?). To say this is not to assert any animal-lib moral superiority of beasts over people; quite the reverse. It’s not that beasts are incapable of selfish self-indulgence: patently, they are – there’s nothing so gluttonous as a pampered dog. Rather it is to say that to live as a beast is to inhabit their moment-to-moment immersion in mortality, and that’s precisely where the pain of being a man inheres. Beasts do not need to rid themselves of the pain of being beasts because that’s not the shape of beastly consciousness; but men who method-act beastiality can never do other than throw into horrible relief their own self-conscious humanity. If you live moment by moment then death is only ever a moment away. It's that moment-ness that narcotics and fantasy are there to obscure.

On Pastoral

:1:

We put culture on one side, bracketing with it society, architecture, religion, art and so on; and we put nature way over the other side, there. Nature doesn't make culture. Or so we think. We make culture. Of course, nature makes us first (inevitably we are, in one sense, a product of nature). But once nature has made us we go on to make another thing, which I'm here calling culture. That two-step is essential to the form of distinction being made; and its doubleness is the structure of pastoral.

Of course it's wrongheaded, as assertions go. We could put it this way: does nature have culture? Nature may manifest society, or something close to it: the pack of dogs, the beehive. But does the beehive have culture? When the bees do their little dance, is that art? We're tempted to say no because the dance of bees is functional, and because we assume bees don't reflect upon the dance as dance. That self-reflection is needful for a performance to be art, presumably. But, really, how can we possibly know? What the bee-dance says to me is that our grasp of the natural world is defined, indeed is constituted, by a kind of existential paucity. It is what we cannot apprehend as culture that is the core of nature. In The Beast in the Nursery Adam Phillips says: 'we prefer the barbarity of culture to the barbarity of nature even though we usually can't tell them apart.' He adds a rather neat after-all: 'there is nothing more cultured than our fantasies about nature' [26]. True, that.

Nature is always the resource that has always already been worked. The landscape is not 'nature'; it is what cultivation has made of the natural resource. Nature is worked, and therefore Pastoral is always reworked—practically speaking, an eclogue is always a reworking of Hughes as a reworking of Wordsworth as a reworking of Vergil as a reworking of Theocritus. Pastoral is a kind of blockchain, and in a more acute and formally self-reflexive sense than the standard 'intertextuality' argument, that insists all literature is a kind of blockchain.

Pastoral as escape, means: there is a benchmark existence from which escape looks both desirable and possible. This rather simplistic explanation, though, leads us into to some surprisingly complex and relevant places. At the risk of over-simplification, we might say: start from a position when life is hard, relentless—when life is work, and life is urban, is scarcity and frustration—then fantasy becomes: ease, unobstruction, leisure, rural, abundant and satisfaction. This is the pastoral of Theocritus and Vergil and Spenser, the classic understanding of the locus amoenus. But something happens to pastoral in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth centuries that rewires this, we can be honest, rather simplistic understanding. (What's facile about it is the way it contains its own contradiction: a life that is all holiday is no holiday at all, since there's no benchmark of tedium and stress from which to escape, and it is the release, not the merely sensual pleasure, that is the key thing). The modification of pastoral entailed a two-step: first Goldsmith's Deserted Village (1770) and Crabbe's The Village (1783) described rural life as hard, draining, frustrating and poor (as indeed it largely is) whilst insisting that once upon a time it had been golden, Arcadian. That is to say, they, and other poets from around this time doing similar things with the pastoral mode, such as John Struthers, Clare and Balfour, were engaged in relocated the nature of Arcadia from being a different place to being a different (past) time. Instead of being defined as a (good) place distinct from the (bad) city or court, it becomes a good (past) time distinct from the bad present. That in turn connects with a longer tradition of 'past Golden Age' mythology. The fit, there, is so precise that pastoral itself can become seen as an mode of nostalgia, or more precisely as the faux-nostalgia of yearning for a time you never yourself actually experienced.

That's not right, though; because, after Vergil, the most important intervention into the pastoral tradition is Wordsworth's poetic creation of 'Nature' as a ground of transcendental aesthetic and ontological value—and that flows directly from the eighteenth-century traditions of Goldsmithian or Crabbean 'anti-pastoral'. I could devote a long passage to establishing this, but this blog-post is shaping up to be long enough already, so I'm going to ask you to take it on trust. You might trust less my insistence that it is from this new thing—I mean, from Wordsworth's new version of 'Nature'—that much of the force and a surprising number of the specifics of modern-day environmentalism as ethos and aesthetic derive. It's true. I mean, I don't want to overstate the influence; although, actually, its hard to overstate the way the 19th-century's most influential English-language poet shaped a whole culture, and the ways in which the later 20th-century Green movements, in reacting against the machinism of early 20th-century Modernist and Popular cultures, inevitably reached back to something always-already Wordsworthian in their revalorisation of natural spaces.

Wordsworth is the second footprint in the 'two-step' I mentioned above. From pastoral as a pleasant Arcadian other place we stride, first, to pastoral as a pleasant Arcadian past-time, to which the anti-pastoral of contemporary rural suffering is contrasted; and second, we move to pastoral as a mode of transcendence grounded in contemporary rural suffering. Wordsworth's Michael (the hero of what the 1815 printing calls 'A Pastoral Poem') has grown very old in a life of ceaseless labour, physical restriction and hardship. But because it has always been a life in Nature, it has been an authentic existential experience of the kind unavailable equally to those to live in the town or the past:

So lived he till his eightieth year was past.
And grossly that man errs, who should suppose
That the green Valleys, and the Streams and Rocks
Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts.
Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed
The common air; the hills, which he so oft
Had climbed with vigorous steps; which had impressed
So many incidents upon his mind
Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear;
Which like a book preserved the memory
Of the dumb animals, whom he had saved,
Had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts,
So grateful in themselves, the certainty
Of honorable gains; these fields, these hills,
Which were his living Being, even more
Than his own blood—what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure which there is in life itself. [Wordsworth, 'Michael', 61-77]

His son Luke goes into the town, and is instantly lost. Only by staying in the country can Michael stay strong, even to his death in his late 80s. Something similar is true of all of Wordsworth's rural poor: the Leech Gatherer, Cumberland beggar, even the mad woman in 'The Thorn'. Nature homes them, in a profound ur-Heideggerian sense, and that fact reconfigures the force of pastoral itself. To cut what could become an over-lengthy excursion short, I'll sketch a line straight from Wordsworth's natural world to the late-20th-century pastoral of Hughes's Moortown poems (1979).

Not, as I say, wanting to labour the point, I'll point only to Moortown's 'Tractor' (it's one of my favourites amongst the whole capacious oeuvre of Hughes, actually) as one place where the pleasant sunny Arcadian wish-fulfillment of pastoral has come all the cold, hard way around to bite its own tail.

The tractor stands frozen—an agony
To think of. All night
Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale,
A spill of molten ice, smoking snow,
Pours into its steel.
At white heat of numbness it stands
In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness.

It defied flesh and won't start.
Hands are like wounds already
Inside armour gloves, and feet are unbelievable
As if the toe-nails were all just torn off.
I stare at it in hatred. Beyond it
The copse hisses—capitulates miserably
In the fleeing, failing light. Starlings,
A dirtier sleetier snow, blow smokily, unendingly, over
Towards plantations Eastward.
All the time the tractor is sinking
Through the degrees, deepening
Into its hell of ice.

The starting lever
Cracks its action, like a snapping knuckle.
The battery is alive—but like a lamb
Trying to nudge its solid-frozen mother—
While the seat claims my buttock-bones, bites
With the space-cold of earth, which it has joined
In one solid lump.

I squirt commercial sure-fire
Down the black throat—it just coughs.
It ridicules me—a trap of iron stupidity
I've stepped into. I drive the battery
As if I were hammering and hammering
The frozen arrangement to pieces with a hammer
And it jabbers laughing pain-crying mockingly
Into happy life.

And stands
Shuddering itself full of heat, seeming to enlarge slowly
Like a demon demonstrating
A more-than-usually-complete materialization—
Suddenly it jerks from its solidarity
With the concrete, and lurches towards a stanchion
Bursting with superhuman well-being and abandon
Shouting Where Where?

Worse iron is waiting. Power-lift kneels
Levers awake imprisoned deadweight,
Shackle-pins bedded in cast-iron cow-shit.
The blind and vibrating condemned obedience
Of iron to the cruelty of iron,
Wheels screeched out of their night-locks—

Fingers
Among the tormented
Tonnage and burning of iron

Eyes
Weeping in the wind of chloroform

And the tractor, streaming with sweat,
Raging and trembling and rejoicing. [16 February 1975]

What's particularly nice about this is the way Hughes's uses a machine as a means of focusing the existential authenticity of post-Wordwsorthian pastoral. It's the right machine, of course; since modern farming could hardly happen without tractors. But still, there's a near-miraculous metamorphosis in the poem, in which an artefact of culture becomes, without slipping into any foolish pathetic fallacy, nature itself. Becomes, we might say, the objective correlative of Michael's persistence, strength and labour. Out of hardship is generated beauty (for surely we can agree this is a very beautiful poem).

I don't know if there's a larger context here, which tracks the increasing pleasantness of general human existence (the case that Pinker makes, and which I suppose persuades me) against an increasing valorisation of hardship as such. If one's life is actually hard, one is less likely to enjoy the artistic re-presentation of that hardship back upon yourself. The starving human finds no pleasure in contemplating going on a diet. If your life is basically comfortable, and your sufferings inward rather than outward, then hardship acquires greater appeal. I don't know: there may be a parallel with politics. When real life is living with an empty belly four days out of every seven, is being cold day after day and dying in your thirties, you'll follow the leader who promises to make your life easy. When seven days are defined by fourteen square meals, and your home is heated and you're staring down the barrel of 70-years-plus, the apparent perversity of valorising hardship makes more sense, and you follow the leader who says he has nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. I don't know.

:2:

This leads me to think again about Empson, the critic, whose writing on pastoral strikes me as some of the best there's ever been. Indeed, some Empsonian ideas, for example that the mere representation of rural pleasure is boring, elaborated at length in Some Versions of Pastoral are actually already present in Seven Types of Amibguity:

It is this (in some sense conscious) clash between different modes of feeling which is the normal source of pleasure in pastoral; or, at any rate, in so far as pastorals fail to produce it, one may agree with Johnson and call them a bore.

Thou shalt eat crudded cream
All the year lasting,
And drink the crystal stream
Pleasant in tasting;
Whig and whey whilst thou lust
And brambleberries,
Pie-lids and pastry-crust,
Pears, plums, and cherries. (ANON., Oxford Book.)

The delicacy of versification here (alliteration, balance of rhythm, and so forth) suggests both the scholar's trained apprehension and the courtier's experience of luxury; but it is of the brambleberry that he is an epicure; the subject forces into contact with these the direct gusto of a "swain." That all these good qualities should be brought together is a normal part of a good poem; indeed, it is a main part of the value of a poem, because they are so hard to bring together in life. But such a case as this is peculiar, because one is made to think of the different people separately; one cannot pretend to oneself that the author is the rustic he is impersonating; there is an element of wit in the first conception of the style. (Seven Types, 114-15)

This formal relation between 'simple' and 'complex' ('putting the complex in the simple', the closest thing in Some Types of Pastoral to a nutshell-definition of pastoral itself, is actually a slogan for all art, as Empson himself knows) stitches form to social relations. Pastoral not only represents but also embodies and therefore enables, a coming-together of poor-simples and rich-sophisticateds.

The essential trick of the old pastoral, which was felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor, was to make simple people express strong feelings (felt as the most universal subject, something fundamentally true about everybody) in learned and fashionable language .... The effect was in some degree to combine in the reader or author the merits of the two sorts; he was made to mirror in himself more completely the effective elements of the society he lived in. This was not a process that you could explain in the course of writing pastoral; it was already shown by the clash between style and theme, and to make the clash work in the right way (not become funny) the writer must keep up a firm pretense that he was unconscious of it. [Some Versions, 11-12]

According to George Watson [The Literary Critics (Hogarth 1986), 184] 'Empson later insisted that his Marxism in the thirties and after—at least until the Communist revolution in China in 1949, which he witnessed—was more serious than his writings reveal, and Some Versions assumed the class analysis of society and the ideal status of the "proletariat".' This is not untrue, although the point for Empson, at least in this book, is always to bring the potential for social harmony back into the orientations of individual subjectivity. René Wellek [A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950: V English Criticism 1900-1950 (Yale 1986), 280] puts forward a slightly more reductive reading.

[The book's] subject is the collapse of the pastoral relation between the swain-hero and the sheep people. It is again the theme of the loss of community, of the presumed original unity which underlies Eliot's concept of history. Pastoral is used in a very wide sense: thus the first chapter discusses proletarian literature which Empson considers a covert pastoral. But even proletarian literature is used in a much wider sense than the usual one ... Proletarian art is pastoral. The old pastoral implied "a beautiful relation between rich and poor" [11] but this relation has broken down, and the old pastoral had been replaced by the mock pastoral, the comic variety at first. Both versions, straight and comic, are based on a double attitude of the artist to the worker ("I am in one way better, in another not so good"), and this may well recognize a permanent truth about the aesthetic situation. "To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public." [15]

Wellek might have added, though he doesn't, that this is a peculiarly Romantic version of 'the artist', which itself problematises the case being made (something of which Empson himself was aware: 'Mob thought may kill us all before our time, but the scientist's view of it should not be warped by horror, and the writer who isolates himself from all feeling for his audience acquires the faults of romanticism without its virtues.'). Actually, the implied individualism of all this is central to what Empson is arguing: not that the poet is alienated from society, but precisely that the (simple) poet holds within him/herself the (complex) of society. Here's Paul Alpers:

Marvell and Milton represent for Empson a withdrawal-to quote the verses that prompt the essay on "The Garden"-of the mind into its own happiness. The strengths of the "old pastoral" are most fully manifest in Elizabethan works, particularly the dramas, which are discussed in the chapter on "Double Plots." The Elizabethan double plot is a version of pastoral, because it is a convention-the strongest and most capacious, it would seem, in all our literature-for the stable presentation of conflicts and contradictions and for putting the complexities of life into the "simple" effects of art. [112]

To quote the man himself: 'in pastoral you take a limited life and pretend it is the full and normal one, and a suggestion that one must do this with all life, because the normal is itself limited, is easily put into the trick though not necessary to its power' [Some Versions of Pastoral, 114]. The element that's missing here is the way that paucity, and poverty, can become precisely the focus for strength in this reading of Nature. After all, Nature is so much bigger than we are. The really Arcadian thing in the natural world is that we have survived this far, at all. To switch back to Hughes it's the superbly insouciant potency of Crow's 'Me, evidently', from the close of 'Examination at the Womb-Door', another key late 20th-century pastoral work:

Who owns those scrawny little feet?      Death.
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face?     Death.
Who owns these still-working lungs?       Death.
Who owns this utility coat of muscles?       Death.
Who owns these unspeakable guts?       Death.
Who owns these questionable brains?       Death.
All this messy blood?       Death.
These minimum-efficiency eyes?       Death.
This wicked little tongue?       Death.
This occasional wakefulness?       Death.

Given, stolen, or held pending trial?
Held.

Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth?       Death.
Who owns all of space?       Death.

Who is stronger than hope?        Death.
Who is stronger than the will?         Death.
Stronger than love?       Death.
Stronger than life?        Death.

But who is stronger than Death?

Me, evidently.

Pass, Crow.

It probably speaks to a continuing adolescence in my aesthetic sense, but by thunder I love that poem.

Burke: thoughts from Berkshire

 Conservatism is broken. Obviously, as a lefty, my words here may strike you as mere partisan sniping, but I don’t mean to speak disrespectfully. Indeed I think there are many conservatives who would agree with me that the political traditions of moderate Burkean conservatism—respectful of tradition, convinced that human flourishing happens best in certain, mostly smaller-scale structures of family and community (churches, schools, universities, friendship groups and so on), anti-authoritarian and small-g governmental, engaged both with civics and individual civility—has been eclipsed over the last four decades or so. 

This has happened, after the manner of a slow-motion car crash, in two stages: first with aggressive free-marketeers for whom all those Burkean values have a price, actually, and for whom they are all conditional, existing on the sufferance of the Market, conceived as the arbiter of everything. Then, more recently, with a group of nativist, racist and populist ‘conservative’ authoritarians: the Berlusconis and Trumps and Orbans and Brexit-barons of today. I would argue that the former led directly to the latter, in part by the scorched-earth deracination of social life that their asset-stripping, coked-up Capitalism entailed; but perhaps I’m wrong about that. But I’m not wrong, I think, in suggesting that what used to be called ‘conservatism’ is in practical disarray today. 

Plenty of people who think of themselves as ‘conservatives’, and who cleave still to those principles Burke so eloquently articulated, have either broken with contemporary political conservatism, or else have gone along with this newer, overwritten version of it for mess-of-pottage reasons (because they, for instance, hoped for more conservative judges, or because, though they disliked Trump, the prospect of a left wing government scared them more) to the present-day regret of some of them. Still, here we are. The recent events in the USA have been alarming indeed, and amongst other things they speak to precisely this kind of fracture. On social media I see some people outraged and disgusted by Ted Cruz’s (disingenuous, we can be sure) mouthing of the ‘stop the steal’ slogan, his continued toadying support for Trump. But it’s easy to see why he’s doing this. He has his eyes on the 2024 election and has made the calculation that Conservatism in the US is now three distinct and inimical groups: traditional moderate conservatives, Evangelicals and Trump's crazy base. The only path to power lies in somehow coalescing these together. That's his play: he figures he can rely on the Evangelicals and that moderate conservatives would vote for him over Kamala Harris, but he knows he can't get over the finish line if he alienates the Trumpists. Hence his lickspittleosity with respect to the Big Baboon.

I’m no expert, and have, I must say, a poor track record when it comes to making political predictions, but I really don’t see Cruz’s strategy working. Trump accrued his base, in the first instance, by saying the things—all those racist and nativist and tub-thumping things he said—no respectable politician would utter. His lucky break was that the Evangelicals decided to overlook his lying, his sexual incontinence, his immodesty and bullying and narcissism, and pitch him their support, something he cannily cemented by choosing Pence as his VP. But that still left a lot of traditional conservatives wavering. The long-story-short history of this period may shake-down into something as simple as: in 2016 enough of these voters disliked Hillary Clinton enough, and/or were prepared to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, to inch him, just, over the line. By 2020 no doubts remain to benefice so far as Trump’s instability and incompetence are concerned, and Biden didn’t alienate old-school conservative voters the way Clinton had done. That leaves US Conservatism humpty-dumptied. I don’t see how Cruz, or anyone else, can glue those three constituencies together again. The Trumpists who stormed the Capitol were chanting hang Mike Pence, after all; and they wouldn't recognise Burke if he boiked them on their bonce with his beak.

This lengthy prolegomenon, though, is not my main point. My main point is the adjective, so often deployed by old-school moderate Conservatives: ‘Burkean.’ It so happens I’ve been re-reading Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)—indeed, say rather I’ve been reading it properly, since I last read it as a gawky and much more doctrinally narrow-minded lefty youth, in my undergraduate days. Now that I’m middle aged my response to the book is, I think, rather more nuanced. Not, I should add, that I’m swinging to the right in my 50s. My core political orientation remains what it has been for a long time now. Of course everyone believes they have good reasons for their political affiliation, and it’s possible mine are mere bias, residual attachment to my upbringing, a congeries of Trillingian irritable mental gestures and so on. But obviously I’d hope not. Indeed, if asked, I’d say that my political beliefs have been bedded-down by my fairly in-depth study of the 18th- and 19th-centuries, undertaken over the last three and a half decades.

As a leftie what I sometimes hear is: ‘Communism is a fine idea in principle; but we tried it, in practice, and it doesn't work.’ The thing is, and speaking ex cathedra as a Professor of 19th-century Literature and Culture, I can say: we also tried full capitalism and it absolutely does not work. We tried it in the UK from the middle of the 1700s (and especially from the New Poor Laws of the 1830s) through to the Liberal government’s introduction of welfare reforms in the early 1900s. It made a tiny fraction prodigiously wealthy and it impoverished or starved the majority. In the 20th-century we (in the west, and elsewhere) experimented with finding the balance between social security and permitting capitalist wealth-seeking. But the hardcore, Brexiter, right-wing dream now is to abolish the social security part altogether. This is a deeply, deeply bad idea. There’s a reason that whole period, from the late 18th-century to the early 20th-, was in essence The Age of Violent Revolutions. When a system disenfranchises, oppresses and starves a majority of its population bloody revolution becomes not only likely but inevitable. I'd suggest we not go back to that. Even Thatcher understood that her ideology required a balance between capitalism and social security. Me, I'd suggest her idea of the balance was weighted too far to the former, but it was still a balance. The Johnsonian-Farageist future doesn't want the balance at all. The most irksome thing is people of my and my parents' generations who enjoyed the manifold benefits of the capitalism/social-security balance & who've convinced themselves that their present-day prosperity is entirely self-authored. I'm-Alright-Jackism of the most toxic kind.

Still, not to rant. The point is: I do find I’ve more time now for Burke’s elegantly expressed insights these days, and more sympathy with Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s volte face (‘Genius of Burke! forgive the pen seduced/By specious wonders’ etc; Prelude Book 7 etc) from youthful radicalism to middle-aged caution. Though I find problems in the book as well.

Written right at the end of Burke's life, the main thesis of Reflections is that the French Revolution is a bad idea. Though he was a lifelong Whig, it could be argued that this book marks a late shift to a more Tory Burke (he wasn't exactly happy about the American Revolution of 1776, but he did think we should establish friendly relations with the new United States; not so France). The book has certainly been praised for its prescience—writing in the immediate aftermath of 1789 Burke predicts that the Revolution will lead both to the Terror and eventually to a military dictatorship in France. Nonetheless, it’s in some ways a slippery book. Burke doesn’t want to argue that all Revolutions are wrong, since it’s a matter of great political and patriotic importance to him that the 1688 Glorious Revolution be affirmed as a Good Thing. Since many of the grounds of Burkean criticism of France could, without much distortion, be teleported back to 1688 and applied there, this involves a certain fluidity of approach.

One main plank of Burke’s argument is that it is both wrong and dangerous to treat ‘liberty’ as an abstract. Everything, he says, is embodied, everything is situated in particular social contexts. Abstraction is a chimera (‘what is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor’). Political questions must be framed in terms of what he calls ‘circumstances’ rather than as ‘metaphysics’:

I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause, in the whole course of my public conduct. I think I envy liberty as little as they do to any other nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on her enjoyment of a government, (for she then had a government,) without inquiry what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer who has broke prison upon the recovery of his natural rights?

It's hardly a novel observation where Burke is concerned to note that he has his own abstractions which he insists deserve reverence. And I’d say there’s more than mere political pragmatics at play here:

Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure – but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born

The argument in this paragraph is that some ‘circumstances’, whilst necessary contexts for existence (how we ensure we have enough to eat and so on), are inferior to others because they are material, pertaining only to ‘gross animal existence.’ Standing over those are higher, purer ‘circumstances’: science, art, virtue and perfection. If we apply Burke’s earlier criteria to these—that is to say, if we treat them like ‘government’ and ‘liberty’—we might say: they surely depend, in a discursively radical way, on whether we’re talking about good science or fake-science of the Lysenko or healing crystals sort; whether we’re talking about good or bad art; whether our virtues are oriented towards kindness or (as it might be) military daring and ruthlessness. They depend upon whatever ‘perfection’ could possibly mean. I have to say, bruiting ‘perfection’ as any kind of political ideal chills me much more than liberty, fraternity or equality as slogans—it has a hideous Pol Pot final-solution remorselessness to it. But I don’t mean to turn Burke’s argument on its head: he would of course reply that he is arguing for a politics that accounts for the messy and imperfect realities of human social existence and against those Robespierres who desire to force human beings into the procrustean bed of inhuman ideals, the very opposite of the Pol Pot approach. So I'll leave that.

Why should we defer to ‘the past’? There are two arguments advanced for this, I think. One is: ‘we should defer to tradition because tradition represents the culmination of long stretches of trial and error that have finally determined what works, in terms of social cohesion, human flourishing, stability and so on.’ This strikes me as wrong, actually, and quite easily demonstrably so. If your ‘it works’ is elastic enough to include the creation both of a self-sustaining crony elite and a huge, immiserated underclass who die sooner, live denuded lives and are starved of opportunity then I don’t think you and I are going to agree on what ‘works’ means, as a word.

Two, though, is closer to the Burkean spirit: that the past is hallowed—that there is something holy about it. I’m also not sure that’s true, as it goes. More, I think that believing so bends an otherwise clever and supple mind into some weird distorting shapes.

A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

This is more like the caricature ‘conservative’, hostile to innovation not on a case-by-case basis, but on principle, that principle being, in sum: ‘what should I put myself out for the unborn generations? What have they ever done for me?’ It is also, I would say, simply false: the biggest differences between most people in 2020 and most people in 1820 are the advantages innovation has bestowed: better technologies and agricultural knowledge so we're all better and more cheaply clothed and better (more nutritously) and more cheaply fed; better medical knowledge and technology; and a panoply of labour-saving devices and machines have freed us—the last type of innovation has disproportionately freed women, a group in whom Burke seems, simply, uninterested—from gruelling and sometimes deadly bondage. Of course Burke here is talking about social innovation, but I’d still argue that democracy has been improved—votes for women, adulthood suffrage and so on—in manifest ways.

Burke might argue that the difference between reverencing the past and reverencing some notional, innovative future is that the past is real and the future a mere fiction of possibilities. But it’s hardly some kind of sophisticated Derridean point (it is, on the contrary, common sense) to note that ‘the past’ is not real in the kick-a-stone sense. It's a set of ideas and assumptions people have in their heads, a mere fiction of eventualities. We all know that a large part of what professional historians do is to set more evidenced and nuanced versions of the past against the popular misconceptions and patriotic distortions many people hold in their heads. The argument ‘we must reverence 1688 because it has already happened, but deplore 1789 because it is setting up things to happen in the future’ is not only specious, it includes its own locked-in sell-by date. Because now that the contemporary republic of France valorises the revolution as its foundational moment, and celebrates every 14th juillet with collective joy, 1789 has become the past that must be hallowed.

But perhaps Burke's being cleverer than I'm allowing. By repudiating abstracts, he evades the need to define his terms; and by saying (as he did in An Appeal From The New to the Old Whigs, 1791) ‘every revolution contains in it something of evil’ he gives himself the leeway to argue whatever he likes about any given revolution. 1688? Good, because it called for ‘a small and a temporary deviation’ in response to ‘a grave and over-ruling necessity’ [Reflections, 25] 1789? Bad. Why? Because I say so, alright?

In a sense it's this (we could almost say) proto-Schmittian approach that is the really remarkable aspect of Burke's argument. It seems counter-intuitive to bracket Burke with Schmitt I know, but there you go. To put the last line of the preceding paragraph in less childish terms, we could quote Carl Schmitt on how soverignty resides in the exception (‘All law is “situational law.” The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision’; Political Theology, ch. 1). W L Renwick is perhaps being a little snide when he observed that the heart of the Reflections was a concept of unity that ‘could allow for only one contract: that made by the Whig nobles in 1688. Between whom it was made, for what purpose and with what degree of rigidity, was never clear and was sufficiently disputed, but for Burke it was absolute.’ But perhaps this snideness misses the point. Perhaps that's the real genius of Burke.